Geoffrey Lean is Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago.

There's still all to play for at Copenhagen's climate summit

There's much media excitement this morning about a supposedly fatal setback to the big climate negotiations in Copenhagen this month. It follows President Obama's announcement yesterday that a full treaty will not be agreed there, a speech by Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen saying much the same, and a refusal by Asia-Pacific leaders at their regional APEC summit at the weekend to endorse a 50 per cent cut in C02 emissions by 2050. All this, it is suggested, will turn next month's meeting into little more than a talking shop.

But it's a fuss about nothing. Things are precisely where they were before last weekend. Though the Copenhagen talks could well yet fail when leaders actually meet in the Danish capital, they are not doomed to do so -and there is still much to play for.

For a start, Apec's failure to agree on the 50 per cent cut is not a "retrograde step", as The Times would have us believe. Though industrialised countries adopted this target at this summer's G8 summit, developing ones have always refused to do so, and were never expected to give such substantial ground before Copenhagen. So it is no surprise that developing country leaders at Apec again declined to endorse it.

Next, the only new thing about Obama's statement that a legally binding treaty will not be concluded in Copenhagen is that he said it. Almost everybody else – including UN Secretary-General Ban Ki -moon, Angela Merkel, the Danish government, and the EU – has been saying the same for weeks, and been widely reported doing so. The cumbersome UN negotiating process has simply run out of time to get a detailed treaty text ready for final negotiation. The Guardian presented Obama's belated repeating of the obvious as a momentous moment, but it changes nothing.

And far from writing agreement at Copenhagen off, Mr Rasmussen set out a detailed, if unreported, blueprint of what he wanted the meeting to achieve: it adds up to a treaty in all but name and legal language. The Independent reported just one of his proposals – to "mandate" further negotations and "set a deadline for their conclusion" – and suggested that he wanted the crucial issues of goals for emission reductions and finance to help poorer countries to be settled later.

In fact the Danish premier's speech made it clear that Copenhagen should reach a "binding" agreement that is "precise on specific commitments" and "provides for immediate action". He added: "We cannot do half a deal in Copenhagen and postpone the rest till later. We need the commitments. We need the figures. We need the action." And, as chairman of the conference, that is what he will be trying to achieve.

So it is still all up for grabs next month, just as it has been all year. Copenhagen may succeed or fail, but it has not yet been written off. Today's almost universal media obituaries are, at the least, premature.